University of Virginia Library

BOOKS

With Maskull On Arctur

By LAWRENCE WHITE

David Lindsay's A Voyage
to Arcturus , now some ten
years old, is out again as a
Ballantine paperback with an
introduction by Loren Eiseley.
Since its first publication the
book has claimed a small,
well-educated, enthusiastic
audience, and we hope the
paperback edition will widen
its readership.

Lindsay's novel is devilisbly
hard to classify. "Symbolic
fantasy" is probably the best
one can do, though that
designation gives one only a
vague notion of the kind of
story Voyage to Arcturus, is.
The narrative combines
elements of pure fantasy,
science fiction (though not the
"hard- science" fiction of
Clement, Campbell, or Clarke),
symbolic novel, and morality
play to make a long,
complicated, sometimes
fascinating, sometimes damned
dull tale whose ultimate
meaning Lindsay seems to have
left readers to puzzle out for
themselves.

A Voyage to Arcturus
concerns the journey of
Maskull, a burly terrestrial who
must have left his sense of
caution in his bassinet, to
Tormance, the inhabited planet
of Arcturus. His companions
for the trip are a small, taciturn
man named Nightspore (we
thought of him as rather a
mystical Calvin Coolidge) and
the sinister Krag, who arranges
the voyage from Earth to
Tormance.

When Krag half-invites,
half-challenges Maskull to go to
Tormance with him, he warns
that Maskull will die shortly
after their arrival. Maskull's
curiosity overcomes his
prudence, and he accepts.
Nightspore, adds Krag, will
survive; but more on this later.

Mr. Lindsay Makes Notes For A Voyage To Arcturus

The three set out for
Tormance in an improbable
transparent spaceship. Maskull
dozes through the journey
(luckily for Lindsay, who
would otherwise have had to
describe the sights of
interstellar space) and awakes
in an alien body on Tormance.
Thus Maskull's adventures
begin, on a bizarre world of
Lindsay's making where laws
of nature topple faster than
regimes in a Banana Republic.

Before starting this book,
let readers be warned. If you
have the patience to weed out
the worthwhile in A Voyage to
Arcturus from the garbage you
will likely enjoy the story. If
that patience you lack, we
suggest you stick with garbage
which has no worthwhile parts
to look for – the Jacqueline
Suzann horrors, for example.

For Voyage to Arcturus has
shrieking faults, to say the
least. Its unorthodox
symbolism is often simply
foggy. The story is too long,
and Lindsay has trouble telling
the dramatic from the
melodramatic, the majestic in
prose from the pompous and
long-winded.

He litters his style with
archaisms. His characters'
kiddle-book names ("
"Swaylone," and doz
are irritating. His
words tire the reader
first chapter or two
times they become c
when Krag reveals tha
will undergo "torm
"Tormance."

When Lindsay ha
the nonsence out of h
however, he cou
delightful prose. All
Voyage to Arcturus
find brief description
beautiful and biza
stand out amid the
blah prose like a Hu
human deserts of Cali

After his od
Tormance, which
multiplicity of del
pains mirrors the